That Enduring Force

I avoided reading Beloved when it appeared in 1987. Toni Morrison won a Pulitzer Prize for it, and later she became the first African American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, but I still stayed away. For decades, I heard the book was difficult — the events in it so evil, so soul-destroying. So I closed my eyes. I believed that if I actually read Beloved, I would carry it inside me forever, unable to let it go. Now that I’ve finished the novel, I know that to be true, as Morrison intended it to be.

When, among a host of racist rants, Donald Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, accused Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, of eating white residents’ pets, three things came to mind that finally gave me the courage to face the book. First, Beloved is set in nineteenth-century Ohio, not far from Springfield, at the home of Sethe and her eighteen-year-old daughter, Denver. They live at 124 Bluestone Road, outside Cincinnati, a stop along the Underground Railway, where they and other runaway slaves from Kentucky had sought refuge. Today many of the ancestors of formerly enslaved people have built their lives in Springfield.

Second, I recalled reading Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis — with his descriptions of Appalachia and his family’s own move from Kentucky to Ohio — when it was published in 2016. Initially I sympathized with Vance’s story about the tribulations of growing up in Middletown as his mother battled substance abuse, about being tethered to a white working-class community in peril. Springfield, Middletown, and Cincinnati are all a short distance from one another, in the state’s southwest corner, north of the Ohio River. I couldn’t help but wonder if Hillbilly Elegy was somehow, even unintentionally, a response to Beloved.

Third, I remembered how much I admired Toni Morrison’s professional example. She was a book editor in New York City for more than fifteen years, while working on her own fiction after hours. Eventually she broke free from her job at Random House to write full-time. Morrison accomplished what few book editors do: publishing her own successful books. I too worked in publishing, leaving the business at thirty-seven to write and to teach. But mostly I taught. It took me until I retired at sixty-two to publish my first novel.

As an adolescent in Canada, I supported the civil rights movement however I could. I’ll never forget watching the Detroit Riot of 1967 from my parents’ home, across the river in Windsor, Ontario, as the smoke from billowing fires wafted to the skies. And now I’ll never forget how the racist and anti-immigrant tropes that Trump and Vance peddled on the campaign trail echo the vicious and vengeful forces that cause Sethe to run from her owner’s plantation, Sweet Home, and to murder Beloved, her baby daughter, rather than see her returned to slavery.

Indeed, the enduring force of racism — what Trump and Vance advanced as candidates and, it seems to me so far, will advance in the White House — is at the core of Beloved. And that force is dehumanizing, even if it looks different than it did 150 years ago. Just ask those Black families in Springfield who were afraid to send their children to school for weeks. Many stayed home behind bolted doors. An older woman told CNN that 2024 was worse than past periods of Ku Klux Klan activity, when at least the hoods announced the hate. Now she just saw faces and had to guess.

Sethe and her surviving children do leave the South, but they bear the cost of their escape. As Morrison explains in my copy’s foreword, she envisioned a novel in which “the heroine would represent the unapologetic acceptance of shame and terror; assume the consequences of choosing infanticide; claim her own freedom.” The jealous and destructive spirit of Sethe’s murdered child ensures that she and her partner, Paul D, cannot remain together. Sethe’s older sons run away from the ghost that haunts them on Bluestone Road. The damage — the mayhem that Beloved unleashes on this Black family — is so intense that no one goes unscathed. Terrible consequences persist for those who try to live outside the psychological bounds of slavery. Today we might call that intergenerational trauma. In Beloved, Morrison describes it for readers in less clinical terms, while tacitly showing how the rhetoric of racism has been reinvented repeatedly in American politics.